We visited Bryson City in October 2025 as part of our October WV/NC Mountains loop. Read about our first Bryson City visit in May 2025 here.

From Waynesville it was a pleasant 45-minute drive to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park parking area near Bryson City. We’d gotten up early and were fortunate to snag an Airstream-length parking spot… otherwise we would have planted ourselves in the horse trailer parking area nearby.

Great Smoky Mountains Railroad does seasonal train rides into the mountains and it looks neat! Maybe I’ll get J to agree to a train ride a some point…

Campground

Big Bear’s RV Park is where we stayed in May, and we happily returned. We love the creekside campsites and proximity to town and the national park. Since we couldn’t check in until 2pm, we chilled with the Airstream in the national park picnic area, hiking and lunching and even showering. Yay for RVing!

Hiking

Hike number 1, the morning we arrived, was a repeat of the waterfall hike we did in May in Great Smoky Mountains National Park just outside Bryson City. It was crowded on the flat sections, but nobody else was on the steep up-and-over section. It’s a really lovely 5-mile hike.

For hike number 2, we wanted to check out Tsali, as I’ve been interested in Tsali as a mountain biking destination since I was a fledgling mountain biker living in Charlotte late last century. The recreation area has several named loops that have flip-flopping schedules for hikers and horses vs bikers. Hikers can hike any day, but I prefer hiking on a non-bike day as it’s much more relaxing.

We wanted to do Mouse Loop for views of Fontana Lake and a shorter length of 8.7 miles (biking trails!) but our target day was a biking day on the schedule. Luckily for us, it rained all morning, so we hiked Mouse anyway and saw zero bikers (and only a couple hikers) on the trail.

Fontana Lake is the largest lake in western NC at 10,000 acres, 239 miles of shoreline, and a maximum depth of 440 feet. It was built for power generation, primarily to produce aluminum in WWII; these days, the dam still generates power, and the lake is used for recreation and flood mitigation. The water level was surprisingly low in October: every year from September to November, the water level is drawn down close to 60 feet in preparation for winter snows and spring rains.

Over 90% of Fontana’s shoreline is protected by either Great Smoky Mountains National Park or Nantahala National Forest, and therefore you won’t see many houses as you hike around the lake. But you will see floating cabins in the water! There are over 400 floating cabins around the lake, and many are available to rent, like this cutie. The Tennessee Valley Authority (which owns the lake) has very strict rules about buying/selling/modifying the cabins; basically, no new cabins are allowed, and existing cabins must maintain their pre-2016 footprint. If you’re interested in floating cabins and have 20 minutes to burn, here’s a neat video overview.

Eating and drinking

With limited time in town, we just returned to our two favorite hangouts from our first visit: Bryson City Outdoors, and Mountain Layers Brewing Co.

We started off with a beer and wifi and gear purchases at BCO. Our favorite shopping in Bryson City is at MRKT and BCO, and I just learned while looking at their sites that they’re related. Good job, team!

Then we moved on to Mountain Layers for bluegrass on the roof deck, with delicious key lime sour (for me) and IPA (for J) and veggie rice bowls from the food truck.

Finally, we headed home to sit by the fire and listen (because we couldn’t the random channel streaming the game through DirecTV) to our football team win with a safety! It was a good day.

In the morning, after hiking in Tsali, we packed up and headed to Asheville.